In Relation
by Li Kayun
Summary: [SuikoIII Silverberg!Musing] What's absolute anyway? Caesar thinks, because that's what he does when he's not sleeping. ((Unedited, sorry.))


Disclaimer: Suikoden belongs to Konami, etc.

A/N:  I am really so bad at writing Suikofics, heh.  And holy damn, I need a beta reader.  X_x

**In Relation**

1. In Relation to Albert 

Vaguely, he remembers a scene so long ago it seems like it is from another world, something so sweet it makes him scoff until his eyes are tired from rolling and rolling.  A little boy used to stand in the winter breezes, before snow and before ice, when the land was blown dry and the grass shrank yellow crowns deep into the soil.  A littler boy still, hair more like the red of a blush rather than the scarlet of blood, used to stand a little behind Him, not knowing if he was good enough to stand _beside_ Him yet.  

A head raises and fingers, bare because the gloves lay forgotten at home, reach up and tug gently on the pocket of a pale gray coat.  The index finger gets caught between a button and a silver clasp, but it twists free with relative ease.  "Hey, hey, what are you thinking about?  You've been standing in the same spot for ten minutes already.  Don't you get bored?"

"No."  The Other turns to look at him, eyes far away past mountains and seas and years.  

"I'm cold," he admits, shoving his small hands in his small pockets.  Almost everything is small about him, from the way he looks to the way he acts.  Sometimes he talks using words too big for his small tongue and trips on them often.  He knows what they mean, certainly, and he knows how to use them formidably, but mouths so small aren't built to accommodate things so large and dangerous.  "It's cold out here."

The Other never asks him to leave.  Somewhere he thinks it's because his presence is appreciated, somewhere he knows that it's because his presence is just there.  

"Rub your hands together, like this," says the Other, trying to demonstrate.  The demonstration is rather hard to follow since the Other is wearing gloves (the Other never forgets).  Because of those gloves, he can't see where the Other's fingers begin or end - and in trying to copy the move, he finds that he doesn't know where to put his thumb and his pinky. But in the end he catches on quickly –since he always does– and rubs them in earnest.  The friction is violent and mad, but it is warm and he sighs in satisfaction.  

However, the heat dies quickly, stolen by the greedy air.  He frowns, and stares at his hands for good measure, because of course _they were to blame.  "It's still cold."_

The Other bends down so that He can stare straight at his small, round face, and he smiles because it's nice feeling like you're not so small anymore.  "Here," says the Other, taking his wrists gently and holding them together with mechanical aptness, "hold them close to your mouth like this, see?"  He nods, and listens extra hard for what the Other says next, because the important words are muffled by his tiny fingers.  "And then you breathe against them." 

He giggles.  "That tickles, Albert."

With a very small smile, He stands. "It should be better though, if you do that in between rubbing them together."  

"Yeah, that's better.  Thanks," he breathes, watching in wonder as his words vanish to smoke in the cold bitter air.  On top of a hill, there isn't much to see.  The ground is dead, the sky is bleak, the school is at least a mile away and he doesn't like looking at people anyway.  He turns again to the pale gray jacket as he scorches his palms.  "Hey, hey, what did you want to come up here for, anyway?"

"To think."

He lets out a comical sigh.  "Well, of course I know _that_, but what are you thinking about?"

"What would you like to do for a living?"

"Other than school?" he clarifies, because to him school is almost endless.

"Yes, other than school."

He's very young still.  He doesn't know what 'changing the subject' or 'evasiveness' is because he hasn't taken that class yet.  He will in three years, but that's three years away, and this is three years before.  All he knows is that the Other is asking him a question, so therefore it demands an answer.  He shrugs nonchalantly, looking at a leaf crackle and tear underneath his right foot.  "I don't know.  Whatever I want to do, I guess.  I think I want to run an ice cream store."

The Other smiles, and this makes him happy.  He grins in return as the Other simply says, "Yeah.  You should do that, Caesar.  It fits you."  He doesn't know what it means, and he never will.  At that time, it is because he doesn't know how something can fit if it isn't a new jacket (those never fit anyway; the sleeves are always too short) or an old hat (he hates wearing hats; they make his hair stick up at odd angles).  

Now, it is because he doesn't think it fits him at all.  He doesn't really like sweets or sugar anymore, save for the occasional ice cream cone.  He likes to breathe on it and watch the edges moisten and melt, slip down the side until he catches it with his tongue.  He hardly has those because Apple only allows it when their traveling expenses even out the way they should and things hardly work the way they should anyway. 

2.  In Relation to Apple

In many ways, he is still a child.  He knows enough for wars and the fall and rise of nations, but knows little in everything else.  He has much time to learn, because he is young, but he'll never realize it, chasing after something too fast and too tall, looking for a shadow in a pitch black room.  His name is a little too big for him; it will take many years to grow into, and even then it will not fit as well as it fits the Other.  He doesn't care though, for he hardly cares about many things these days past the what's-for-dinner's and how-much-is-it-to-stay-at-the-inn-Apple's.  

Apple clearly does not enjoy talking to him as much as he enjoys talking to her, mainly because she's actually talking and he's only teasing.  She drums her fingers on the table once he opens his mouth, or twirls her pen between her fingers.  She seems like she'd rather talk with Landis… but every time he laughs with that sleepy dazed smirk of his, she smiles.  Nonetheless, they talk all the time, isolated by mind and ideas rather than blood.  In his experience, blood only serves to drive people apart anyway.  

It doesn't matter very much anymore what he says, because under those bad jokes about fruits and worms, she knows exactly what he means.  

She also knows that in the end, there will come the day when he will see the Other again, when they won't be on opposite sides, but he doesn't.  He thinks this is the way it will always be, because this is the way it has always been since that unsaid broken promise - and for him, that's almost the whole world.  When the day comes, he won't know what to do, and will probably look stupider than he ever has in front of a person he wants to impress, but that won't embarrass him much because it's always been like that anyway.  Some things never change, because they aren't meant to.

She remembers a scene tucked so neatly within the fabric of her life that she doesn't have the time to appreciate it, but she remembers it clearly nonetheless.  He barges into her room, unannounced and in the middle of the night.  It is hardly surprising, though it irritates her to be deprived of and disturbed in sleep.  She glares at him half-heartedly through her newly-donned glasses as he crosses the carpet and slumps down in her chair, which creaks under his weight with its old age.   Waving a restless hand, "Hey, Apple, I've decided that the reason you're always so grumpy after dinner is because you have a chronic case of indigestion."

"Caesar," she says, with a startling amount of patience it's almost frightening, "does this have an actual objective?"

"How long do I have this time?" he asks, promptly, with a smug and satisfied little grin.  He sounds a little tired, looks a little tired, and she doesn't know why because he never does anything other than sleep all the time anyway, silly child.  She thinks that maybe it is because he spends all his free time – all his time not sleeping – catching up on work he should've done while he was.  She doesn't bother to scold him for it, for he hardly ever listens to her about matters such as that.  

"About three seconds before I start throwing books at you," she answers, and it is admiringly gentle, even with her fingers twitching.  

"Oh, well, I was talking about the chandelier."  Even as he says this, he knows he will think twice before disturbing a woman's beauty sleep from now on.  

"I'm tired, Caesar.  What do you want?" she says finally, rubbing the spot between her eyebrows.

"I wonder, Granny Apple, why you always think I want something when I come to talk to you?"

With a sigh, "Very well then, what did you come for?"

"To ask you for something, of course," he replies, with a grin.  "I want to borrow a book from you.  Not to read, of course, I've read almost all your books already.  I just need one so that I can put it over my face tomorrow during the meeting so they won't start poking at my face once I fall asleep.  Dupa said the next time I did that without a helmet I'd wake up with an eye gauged out and I like my eyes where they are thankyouverymuch."

"And you figure that one of my books can serve as a helmet?"

"Hey, hey, Apple, your books are deadly," he says, in the tone of a parent explaining to a child.  The irony amuses her, and she smiles.  "They can knock someone dead if aimed correctly, or at least induce a coma when you actually start _reading _from them."

She reaches into a drawer with the few possessions she has and grabs a random book from the three rows with four books each arranged neatly in a line in alphabetical order by author last name, flinging it to him carelessly.  He catches it with both hands and looks down at it with an upside-down smile.  It is only when he speaks that she knows why.  "Not _this book.  I don't want to have _this_ book in my face while I'm sleeping."_

He tosses it back into the drawer carefully, and shrugs, standing.  "Nevermind then.  Thanks anyway, my wormy Apple.  I'll go risk my eye.  G'night."  He exits loudly, because he never does anything like that softly, but she doesn't notice, staring down at the battered cover protecting pages and pages about a war not-so-long ago, fought by a son against a father, about True Runes also, about suffering and rebellion also, with Silverbergs also.  

Because she is tired, and because it is the middle of the night, she forgets it in the morning.  

Looking back, running her fingers over the leather-bound volume, she smiles sadly at the yellowed paper and the blank ink words.  His last name is repeated and repeated, and in his shoes, she doesn't know how she would be able to stand sleeping with ghosts like that in her face either.  She thinks that perhaps she should go buy an ice cream.  Apple always listens more when people weren't talking rather than when they were.  

3.  In Relation to Duty and Family

It isn't really duty as much as it is what he wants to do.  He feels no string binding him to Budehuc Castle or its inhabitants – except for Apple, of course, she holds all the money in her pocket after all.  He stays here and helps the Grasslanders, the Zexens, and the etcetera and etcetera because it's something he can do and as much as he likes to sleep, he likes to do something while his eyes are open too.  More importantly, he does it because it pisses the Other off, to be crude.

He does not like his bloodline, has not liked his bloodline for a long time.  He does not like it because it stands for a great deal of things he'd rather not think about.  It stands for the color of the earth after defeat.  It stands for countless wounds received while traveling, for he searches and searches but never finds, helpless and not knowing how to fight.  It stands for a great and respected heritage, one that his father belonged to, one that his mother married into, one that he does not like.  

Sometimes, he sits across the table, acting as though he might think himself the cleverest thing in the world.  The war rages on a short distance away, around and outside and inside him.  Steel clashes against steel, sweat and battle cries rise in the air, and it reeks of blood and metal.  He pretends to sleep, his feet crossed on the table, his hands behind his head, only rousing when they ask him what to do next.  Always, he smiles and laughs as he answers.  

Hugo once approaches and asks him about Albert; because the kid's everything a hero has to be.  He's brave and he's true and he's strong and possessed of divine elemental powers, which also happen to include somewhere a natural curiosity (actually, "nosy" fits better in his opinion but Apple deems it rude) about everyone under his command.  He figures that Hugo thinks it is part of being a leader, befriending and knowing about every single comrade.  

"He's…really your brother?"

Reclining in the shade of a tree, shifting slightly since where Hugo is found outside, Fubar is found and where Fubar is found his feathers – currently poking into his arm – are found, he merely nods with his eyes closed.  "Yeah."

"And you don't think anything about it?"

"Hey, the world isn't perfect."

"But he's your brother."

"Yeah," he replies, with a smile.  "I kinda figured that out before you, sorry."

Hugo looks down at the grass, brows furrowing.  When he lifts his head, he looks around the castle at his mother, standing off to the left conversing fighting formations with Beechum.  "I don't think I could ever fight a family member."

He laughs lightly because the mood is perfect for a laugh and because he feels like it.  Because he is not the type of person that holds sharing in higher regard than sleeping, he does not say how his case is different since his family has always been fighting each other.  He hasn't the faintest clue what Hugo's thinking, let alone even trying to read the griffon, so therefore he doesn't really care.  "Don't worry about it.  I don't think I could be the Flame Champ either, so I guess we're even."

He wants to end the war not because he's lost a friend, not because he's off to find some blinding discovery about his family history (goodness knows he has enough of that) or to fulfill a long-forgotten promise but because through some work of his foolish, practical logic, he figures that when there are no more wars to be fought, then there will be no more wars to be fighting over.  Yet while it rampages, he hopes to heaven that the Other will lose, to hell that He'll lose the war and the war _only_, not anything more, and to everything between those two boundaries that the Other is watching him undo and untie and knock down.

He wants to prove how everything was useless after all, how much better it would've been if the Other hadn't walked away _first no matter how much tactician's blood ran in their veins, no matter how well their minds worked with the number of troops versus the amount of ammunition rather than with the number of sprinkles per scoop.  He wants to prove the worth of a promise, wants to prove the worth of a broken promise, and wants to go home in the end to a place he can actually think of as home._

There are so many lies in this world, though.  He doesn't know if he really is proving the truth anymore.

He wants to prove it desperately, nonetheless, to those that can't see past a name, for those who can.  It's a large task, he knows, and his shoulders are weak and thin, but he thinks that someday he'll be able to manage, without crutches and brothers and Apples to lean on.  He also wants some more hours to sleep, wants to know how Juan can possibly find so much time to take naps with so many warriors in the vicinity when a tactician can hardly spare a minute.    Lastly, he wants an ice cream.  

His bloodline stands for red hair and redder hair on a winter day talking about ways to warm hands, stands for strawberries in the strawberry ice cream, and the color of his missing gloves.  It stands for apples and cherries and plums.  Well, maybe not plums, but his memory for fruit is lacking.  It stands for the color Apple turns every time he mentions something about being a housemaid instead and the same but not color she turned once when she had actually thrown a book that _had _hit him (square on the forehead too, in fact) and he had fallen onto the polished floor in a heap.  

As he rises slowly, he turns in the shade of the tree and watches as Apple approaches holding something that is definitely not study material.  He blinks and for good measure blinks again, rubbing his eyes free of sleep before he asks with a smile that was not tired or lazy or thoughtless at all, "How are we supposed to study tactics with that?"  Apple rolls her eyes as she hands him the ice cream cone, and he remembers again a cold winter day when hands and breath taught him how to keep his fingers from freezing.  Ice cream stores and pinky promises replace last names and tactics.  

"Albert liked this flavor too," he says without thinking, and shrugs without noticing that he had said it.  Apple smiles at him, but he's not looking at her.

Though he does not like his bloodline and all the trouble it causes, he realizes that "family" has a different definition past wars and little fingers and politics, and he loves them ruthlessly and unknowingly.  


End file.
